Writing the Walls Down – a Forthcoming Anthology from Trans‑Genre Press

Writing the Walls Down explores the physical and metaphorical significance of walls in our external landscapes as well as in our internal emotional and imaginal landscapes. We’re asking writers what stories do city walls, border walls, and prison walls have to tell us? What stories are stuck inside bedroom walls, kitchen walls, and the walls that separate neighbors from each other? How do these walls mirror the ones we learned to build inside our own bodies? And what have been the consequences?

Reflecting on the necessity of this anthology at this time, Amir Rabiyah, a trans Arab American poet, says:

We don’t have enough conversations about how physical barriers cause internal barriers. On the outside, they have a purpose, to put people in their place. But how do these walls show up in our relationship to ourselves, to the world, and to each other? They show up in stories like ‘I don’t trust people’ and an internalization of scarcity.

As a queer white woman from a Caribbean society, I’m troubled by the tradition of walls that have been used to keep people of color out, and in. Plantation walls, prison walls, church walls, and now the walls of gated communities; these walls control access to resources, they control the way we think about where we belong, and our power in the world as black and brown and white people. They’ve been used to protect white people’s assets and entitlement, and to reinforce a world view of ‘us’ vs. ‘them’. I’m hoping this anthology will bring forward a critique of walls from a unique perspective – queer and trans people of color and their white allies.

**Writing the Walls Down emerged out of a 2010 National Queer Arts Festival performance, The Walls Project, co-curated by the editors, Amir Rabiyah and Helen Klonaris, and will be a multi-genre gathering of US and international voices in an effort to generate a cross cultural and nuanced dialogue that not only examines the power of walls to divide, but walls as sites of resistance, (re)connection, and community.

Helen Klonaris is a queer Greek Bahamian writer and educator living between the Bay Area and the Bahamas. She is the co-director of the Bahamas Writers Summer Institute, and the founder and director of The Gaulin Project, a migratory creative inquiry program.

Amir Rabiyah lives in Oakland, California. His work has appeared in Mizna, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion and Spirituality, the Asian American Literary Review, Enizagam, Troubling the Line: Trans and Gender Queer Poetry and Poetics and more.

A Note from the Director of Trans-Genre Press:

I am excited (“dancing around my room” style) to be working with Helen and Amir on Writing the Walls Down. It is the kind of project I knew immediately I wanted to be working on, and definitely wanted to read no matter who published it.

I see Writing the Walls Down as an opportunity to begin building bridges between our community and our supporting communities and allies. Writing the Walls Down offers space for all genders (cis & trans) to participate and have a voice in reclaiming common ground, as well as to create gender rich and affirming media alongside creative cultural dialogue. – A.J. Bryce